Eephus
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes
Stars: Frederick Wiseman, Bill Lee, Keith William Richards
Writers: Michael Basta, Nate Fisher, Carson Lund
Director: Carson Lund
The New England sun is already getting low in the October sky as 18 mostly middle-aged guys take the field for their final beer league baseball game of the season. It’s also, probably, their last game forever, since the ratty field of dreams they’re playing on will, this time next year, be occupied by a middle school.
So, it is with a mix of nostalgia and determination to go out a winner that the Adler’s Paint nine and the River Dogs — a team with, apparently, no local corporate sponsor — lug their bat bags and six packs (the drinking kind) into their opposing dugouts. It matters not who is the home team and who is the visitor. As the guys settle in, there’s no doubt that ragtag Soldiers Field is their turf, no matter what uniform they’re wearing.
Experiencing Eephus — named for the lazy, arcing, barely-there pitch that certain pitchers have long used to confuse and embarrass aggressive batters — I was reminded of the evening I wandered down to a community ballfield in the tiny community of Frenchtown on the island of St. Thomas, USVI. I sat there in the peeling wooden stands, the blue sky shifting purple, the lights turning the field into an island of green on an inky black sea, and abandoned myself to the soft rhythms of a game played by guys who’d suited up that night not for glory; not to emulate the bang-bang acrobatics featured on ESPN weekly wrap-ups.
I thought of an interview I’d seen with legendary Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a master of the Eephus.
“Damn,” he’d said, speaking of Cuban baseball players. “They play for the right reason. They play because they love the game.”
Just as I obviously did not know anyone on those St. Thomas teams, so the cast of Eephus — accomplished actors all, yet virtually anonymous to anyone outside New England — appear here as a clean slate. Co-writer/director Carson Lund, making an uncommonly understated feature film debut, doesn’t introduce the characters so much as draw us into their individual quirks and qualities. There’s the guy who plays to make his young children proud — and whose worst nightmare is striking out in front of them. The Adler’s Paint pitcher boasts he’ll go the whole nine innings while his teammates nod knowingly, fully aware he’ll run out of gas after three. His opposite number on the River Dogs has a curious pitching delivery that involves flapping his arms like a chicken. He also dips into the beer cooler with alarming frequency. And the River Dogs’ player/coach — the closest thing this film has to a central character — is kind of on the outs with everyone because his company is building the school that will soon devour this sacred ground.
The runs are scarce. The foul balls and walks pile up. Guys try to steal and get tagged out, fairly limping into second base. The outfielders get distracted watching soccer players on an adjacent field, sensing they are witnessing a hometown sports future that will not include catcher’s masks and batting gloves.
Glancing around the ballpark, we become aware of off-field characters: The old man with a cane ambles down for a few innings, then leaves even though the score is tied. A food truck loudly hawks pizza slices. Two skateboarders try, with no success, to discern the rules of this game. There’s the official scorekeeper, a guy named Franny, who sets up a lawn chair and old TV table where he meticulously registers the backward Ks and BBs, chronicling the final Soldiers Field game with an earnestness that he has clearly displayed for decades.
It’s getting dark. The league-hired umpire leaves, even though the game, now in extra innings, is still tied. Unwilling to let the last game end in a draw, the players turn to Franny as a replacement.
“I’m not any good,” he chirps, “but I’ll do it.”
Despite Eephus’ brief run time, we nevertheless feel every second of these last minutes on Soldiers Field. That’s not a bad thing; few baseball movies have so authentically conjured the game’s sense of timelessness; the notion that this game could, theoretically, go on forever so long as no one is ahead at the last out of the inning.
Just when it seems like the Adlers Paint pitcher’s arm is about to fall off, a stranger pokes his head into the dugout. His name is Lee. He says he’s a former pitcher.
“I can get you three outs,” he promises with a smile.
The guys look at each other, then nod with some resignation. It’s the only moment in Eephus that does not ring absolutely true, because any self-respecting New England baseball fan would recognize Lee as Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the pitcher who so loved Cuban players, the guy who galvanized Boston Red Sox fans with his Eephus pitch during their monumental mid-1970s World Series runs.
For the record, at 78, Lee still has pretty good form.
Lee’s appearance is just one of the quiet pleasures of Eephus, a film that isn’t interested in the operatic mythology of The Natural, nor the scrappy competitiveness of Bull Durham, nor the sentimental sweetness of Bang the Drum Slowly. These guys don’t play the game well. They don’t even play it with particular passion. They sit in that crappy dugout, barking insults across the diamond and muttering encouragement to their teammates largely because they always have. They’ve no interest in taking their game to some distant field next year. And they’re even all pretty noncommittal when it comes to getting together for drinks sometime this winter. This field…those trees beyond the outfield…that crumbling press box behind home plate; it just seems impossible to look beyond saying goodbye to all those things.
At last, the game’s end — long after dark — comes in the quietest of ways. The guys collect their beer cans, bag their bats and balls, climb into their cars and drive off into the night.
Staying behind, hunched over his scorebook, is Franny.
“Today,” he says, mimicking Lou Gehrig’s Yankee Stadium farewell, “I consider myself…the luckiest man…on the face of the Earth.”
To truly enjoy Eephus, you just might need to be a baseball fan. And by that, I mean a real fan of the sights and sounds of the game at its most tedious level: The scrape of cleats on a concrete floor, the drag of a bat in the dirt, the distant thud of a ball hitting a leather glove, the impossible science of hitting a round ball with a round bat and raising a cloud of dust as you try to beat that ball to first base.
Eephus is about all of that: the cry of “Play Ball,” the final “Yer out,” and the liturgy and lore that come between.
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